Human Potential - SNAFU

"At a point in space, the human potential is the potential energy per unit of charge that is associated with a time-invariant human field. It is typically measured in awareness, and is a Lorentz scalar quantity. The difference in human potential between two points is known as consciousness."

Humans are funny creatures.. One of the things my ol' sensei shared an interest in was military research in telepathy. Over here in Europe we don't hear much about that, but in the US, with it's military-industrial complex several decades of valuable applied research has been done by several government agencies. Pioneered by Ingo Swann a methodology, Controlled Remote Viewing, has been constructed that will enable (normal) people to learn how to use a certain type of cognition. Together with Russel Targ and Hall Puthoff at the Standford Research Institute they had been trying to sift through the different phenomena and get to a better understanding. During the mid-70's funding for the research program moved from the CIA to the DIA, and in 78 a Remote Viewing program was started by the Department of Defense.
The methodology is very intriguing in the sense that it appears similar to signal processing with human consciousness, it contains ways to enhance a signal, to steer, to recognize too much interpretation (Analytical Overlay) and different stages people go through when working honestly following the methods.
Needless to say results were convincing, and Remote Viewing has been used for nearly two decades as a source of Intelligence gathering. Politics and human nature eventually caused the program to seize, but all the more interesting in 1995 the CIA declassified portions of the program.
Gradually, once the word started spreading, Remote Viewing was picked up by the large community of psychic charlatans which inhibits American society and nowadays the term is being used for any kind of synaptic activity completely unrelated to the methodology. Luckily the coin has another side, and also former members of the army programs have come forth to teach the methods. Paul Smith, author of Reading the Enemy's Mind is moving mountains of work to get the word out, and the methodology taught. Lyn Buchanan is running a successful company that specializes in training and 'services', and using an evaluation and feedback construct, as well as recognizing and applying viewer's strengths and weaknesses, is able to deliver results with a success ratio of some 90%. That is quite something different than a 50-50 chance..
Paul Smith runs both the Remote Viewing training and consultancy firm RVIS as well as the International Remote Viewing Association, IRVA, which organizes conferences and events.
Tamra Temple, my ol' sensei's former wife, has done an incredible effort in going through the declassified files, sorting them, scanning them, and has made them available as a set of CDs on www.stargate-interactive.com.
Now, why would i post about this. For one, sometime in the nearby future when i have more people working with my company, i would be rather averse of management training, but would like to present them with a training like this. Just for them, to get in touch with a higher degree of human potential, and accessing these skills just because we live in this wonderful universe. It will open doors for them that might remain closed when they would conform to a semi-robotic suit-and-tie culture somewhere else. It is a human skill, and what they learn from it they can apply in life or business, whichever is their choosing.

On another note, that fact that telepathy and precognition are proven subjects, that kind of sets certain things i'd like to move forward with upside down. How artificial will aLife be when human consciousness doesn't stop at the skull ? Of how much value are the large number of statistics research reports when disregarding something like this ? Wouldn't statistics be a flat-world scenario when assuming a 50-50 chance when tossing a coin ? And shouldn't it benefit from a kind of Minkowski space background to better reflect certain tendencies ? Like an earlier post paraphrasing from Gulliver's Travels, the assumption that human creativity can easily be surpassed by a raw number-crunching machine, not just to defeat a chess player by sheer brute force, but to replace the free flow of ideas humans are capable of. I don't think so, but then again i also view intelligent awareness as something inherent to everything..however rudimentary it might be with modern day computing, or a scratch on something being it's 'memory' of whatever made the scratch, so that places some interesting bets on aLife and it's future, but not just from the simple fact of emerging properties when a whole is constructed from parts, but also of something bigger where the parts are influenced by the whole. That remains something i miss in the research on complexity at e.g. the Santa Fe Institute, however interesting i find it all.One thing Remote Viewing also showed in it's early stages with regards to selecting people, in usual research one tried to select Joe Average and present him/her with a large set of very boring tests, usually without any positive or negative feedback. For selecting the early candidates for Remote Viewing however, there was a simple suggestion which can be expressed as 'select people that have shown to be successful when confronted with a new subject matter'.. and make things challenging, and provide appropriate feedback, not with loads of insincere cheerios but just honest appreciation. That works.
So, one of the things i'd like to develop once is an incentive-driven evolutionary computation engine which will steer it's little self-categorizing adaptive agents towards building applications. Nice and freaky.. a bit like John Holland's ECHO project but with more cybernetic feedback loops, paving the way to a future where materials can be programmed, or a house can be grown from the seeds of a tree. In due time.